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Royalty is an enduring topic in popular culture, from beloved animated princesses to historical monarchs and their tourist-inviting palaces. Many films, television shows, and books have imagined the life of the ruling class from their point of view, but Jac Jemc’s latest novel, Empty Theatre: Or the Lives of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Sisi of Austria (Queen of Hungary), Cousins, in Their Pursuit Of, offers a fresh take.
This tragicomedy follows the lives of King Ludwig of Bavaria and Empress Sisi of Austria from the beginning of their respective reigns to their untimely deaths. Between such bookends is a human struggle for meaning and fulfillment. Ludwig champions art and architectural feats above all else. Behind Sisi’s beautiful face is a depressed and isolated mother struggling to find solace. Although this book is fiction, the intensive research that went into this novel is evident on the page. Jemc invokes sympathy for the cousins while also calling to attention the way their combined unhappiness brought suffering to those around them and their kingdoms.
Jemc, who teaches Creative Writing at UC San Diego, is the author of My Only Wife, The Grip of It, and False Bingo, which won the Chicago Review of Books Award for fiction in 2017. I spoke with her about trying new things as a writer, why she decided to focus on Ludwig and Sisi, and what examining historical figures might tell us about our present moment.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Caitlin Stout
Something I admire about your work is the sense of “limitless” possibility that accompanies your characters and narratives. You’ve mentioned previously that you’re compelled to write about what you want when it comes to your interests and obsessions. What drew you to write a historical fiction novel about nineteenth-century royals?
Jac Jemc
I decided to write about Ludwig and Sisi because I went on vacation to Germany and the Czech Republic in 2014. I went for a tour of Ludwig’s most famous castle, Neuschwanstein. It’s the castle that the Disney World Castle is based on. I was especially intrigued by, number one, the fact that he was really bad at his job and only cared about paying for operas and building these castles. Number two, that he was gay and that the historical record had tried to cover that up to the best of its ability for a really long time. And number three, at a certain point, his statesmen had become so frustrated with him not doing his job and only caring about operas and castles that they had him declared insane by a doctor who had never met him. Then, within 36 hours, he was found drowned outside of his castle with his doctor and still no one knows what happened.
That story, that kind of murder mystery aspect of it was what really drew me in. At the time, I was still wrapping up The Grip of It, my last novel. And so I was really excited about the idea of having a different vocabulary of image and place and setting and language to work with in a project. The idea of trying to understand a different historical moment and a different historical figure and Bavaria was really exciting to me. I started researching a bunch and was troubled by the idea that I was going to spend a bunch of years talking about a white male figure of empire. So I started looking at other people in his life and there were all these really compelling women in his life, not romantically connected with him, but as friends or as side figures. I let the research get a little bit out of hand and was researching while I was trying to draft and adding characters and then taking away and then adding and that’s how it started and continued.
Caitlin Stout
What’s interesting is, while Empty Theatre would likely not be considered horror like The Grip of It, or even terrifying like your collection False Bingo, there are elements of repulsion, shock, and fear in Ludwig and Sisi’s lives, especially because they’re in this sphere of being “ahead of their time.” In many ways, they seemed to be living nightmares despite their status.
Jac Jemc
I think that when I started working on the project, I wasn’t sure where it was going to fall tonally. One of the things that definitely did appeal to me with Ludwig was this idea that’s kind of parallel to what happens in The Grip of It, where he’s creating these structures, these castles that are an externalization of his inner psychological turmoil. They’re very beautiful, but they’re also very Gothic and troubling and they create huge amounts of issues in his life. Sisi and Ludwig also come from this family line called the Wittelsbach that have been inbreeding for centuries and have quite a few members who have suffered from an insularity of genetics. I think that was one of the things I was thinking about, too—the way that both of them worry about that at various points of the novel. They are, in some ways, distrustful of themselves, because they’re not sure if that line of madness exists in them or if they are sound of mind. And I want to be careful about how I’m talking about all this stuff. I want to be clear that I’m talking about it very much in the language of the time, rather than the way that I would talk about these things in the current moment. So that was definitely in my mind while I was working on this. Then they both end up isolating themselves, too. That distance from other people—it kind of is the heart of terror, essentially, right? Because you don’t feel like you have anyone you can trust, you don’t feel like you. You just have this sense of dread all the time because it feels like there’s no one to lean on or share with. I think all of those things are at the heart of this book. It is a really sad book. But I also think that a lot of their sadness, Ludwig in particular, comes from a certain fear.
Caitlin Stout
You can definitely see that, not just through the historical accounts of their lives, but through a satire like this—that odd mix of status and unhappiness. Because this is also a deeply funny novel.
Jac Jemc
That was something that surprised me. I didn’t think it was going to be funny at first. And then when I sold this book, we sold it as a package with a short story collection. When I talked to my editor, Emily Bell at FSG, she has since moved on—I’m working with Daphne Durham now—but when I talked to Emily Bell on the phone about the project, she was like, “I’m so excited. This is so funny. It’s so different for you.” And I was like, “It’s funny?” Then looked back at everything that I had and realized, “Oh, it is funny. Yeah.” I hadn’t realized how much I had let my kind of narrative voice of judgment creep in and I think that’s where a lot of the satire ends up coming in.
Caitlin Stout
When I visited Schönbrunn Palace last summer, I learned about the family connection to Marie Antoinette and the Wittelsbach disease, which is an intriguing part of that shared history because they are several big characters in this family line. I think you can see some of the commonalities, especially between these two and Marie Antoinette, regarding their vanity and these absurd habits that go beyond duty to their people. At one point, you describe Sisi as an “underperforming deity,” which I love. Then, of course, Ludwig is charismatic, though eccentric, and believes he is king by divine right. What role do you think satire plays in telling such a double-sided story of privilege and misfortune?
Jac Jemc
What’s fascinating to me is the way they bungle that privilege. They’re so bad at being happy with being in a position where they can have absolutely anything they want.
There’s almost no logic, at certain moments, as to why they behave in the way they do. And then there are some things that make sense or are innate to them. With that sense of absurdity and pointing out the absurdity and the hypocrisy, I feel like they lack so much awareness of the world around them. Both in their homes and also in the world at large. I don’t think I could have written a book where I took them 100% seriously, without passing a little bit of judgment—even if I was ultimately trying to show them a little bit of understanding or, at the very least, a retelling of their story that allows for the possibility that the dominant historical record is not the only truth of their lives.
Caitlin Stout
I was struck, too, beyond holding sympathy for Ludwig and Sisi, that I also found myself empathizing with the people who had to put up with them. It seems Sisi and Ludwig are not the only tragic characters in this story. Was there any other character that, while you were researching, you were like “Wow, okay. There’s a story to be told here”?
Jac Jemc
There are so many. In the first ten or twenty pages of the book, Ludwig’s first wet nurse dies. I found myself thinking about all her other servant friends who had to go on doing their job after their friend just died.
And all of the people who are waiting on Ludwig, trying to do their job in the castle only to find out that someone thinks they’re ugly so they’re not allowed to do their job anymore. It’s hard not to feel for their body of subjects. There’s this devotion to royalty, especially if the royals are young. And there’s this kind of obsession with the heir. You still see it in British royalty.
There were two full storylines for other figures that I ended up cutting eventually. One was Lola Montez, who’s this kind of con artist, courtesan, and dancer, who seduces Ludwig’s grandfather at the beginning of the book. Another was Elisabet Ney, who sculpts Ludwig and who maybe Bismarck tries to talk into convincing Ludwig to sign Bavaria over to the North German Confederation. I’d written out their entire storylines but then, ultimately, I felt like it was taking away from the overall book.
Caitlin Stout
That parallel between more contemporary figures is also interesting. I’ve often seen Sisi and Princess Diana compared, for example, because they share elements of a life cut short, the “tragic beauty queen” story, and also the idea of needing to produce an heir.
Jac Jemc
Yeah, and both of them want to have a little bit more fun than the powers that be would allow. I think there’s a clear parallel between the rigidity of Hofburg and Buckingham Palace. It feels like those are both particularly humorless houses as far as how they want their royals to perform.
Caitlin Stout
Circling back to the additional storylines for Elisabet Ney and Lola Martinez, you can tell the research you put into these characters because their stories are so contained. The whole novel is told in an episodic setup, moving back and forth between acquaintances and days and events in Ludwig and Sisi’s lives. Yet there’s also a distance retained in maintaining a third-person narrative versus speaking directly from their perspectives. Could you talk about the decision to write these stories from a removed perspective rather than first-person?
Jac Jemc
My first two novels are both first-person. The Grip of It is alternating first-person with two characters. The most basic answer for why this book is in third-person is because I decided I had to try to write in third-person. There were definitely parts where I felt this was the wrong project to write a third-person novel in because I wanted to show some understanding of these figures. But then the book started to turn itself into something that could only have been written in third-person because people still don’t understand either of these people and will never fully understand them. Having that distance, you’re allowed to see both figures with a little bit of mystery still imbued in them and also people’s reactions to them around them, which I think is really important in the book and adds to that idea of satire, too.
There are chapters where neither of them are present, it’s just speculation on what happened. Being in the third-person allowed me to exist in the same position more traditional historical narratives exist in, but to do it in a different way. Without saying, “Okay, to understand them, we need to go fully inside of them and only see what they see.”
Caitlin Stout
Did you learn anything about yourself as a writer by switching over to the third-person?
Jac Jemc
Number one, I’m less afraid of writing in the third-person. I realized there are all of these possibilities that existed I wasn’t using or embracing.
I’m very fascinated with this idea of not just an unreliable narrator but an unreliable character. I had been leaning on the idea that it had to be a narrator. Writing in the third-person allowed me to start thinking about how unreliability, and this last bit of distance even between two people who are very close. How there’s still that little unbridgeable distance where people can’t know each other and someone is a mystery to you. So thinking about how to explore that and consider it when you’re not fully within the consciousness of the characters and instead outside.
Caitlin Stout
In your acknowledgments, you describe this novel as “a fiction based on many personal fictions.” Can you talk about your own research and how you decided to shape this story? The novel begins and ends with their deaths.
Jac Jemc
I researched too much, honestly. I read every biography I could find about them, anyone they knew, diaries or letters written by them, and the people around them to gain some insight into how other people were experiencing the time that they were in power. Then I went to all the castles. I loved it, but the one thing that I uncovered was none of the things that I was looking at, on their own, were reliable or trustworthy sources. All of it was filtered through some image projection the crown wanted to show the people, like identity management. When I say the book is fiction based on many personal fictions, it’s because I don’t know that any of the documents that I looked at are reliable.
Ludwig’s death was the thing that brought me into being interested in the topic. I felt like I needed to do the same in the book, too: here’s the first thing that you need to know. Things only get weirder from here. You think that’s big, just wait.
In that way, the process of shaping the book started with a parallel of what my experience was learning about all of these characters. The movement and shape of the book are basically the chronological tellings of their lifetimes. It is told in staccato burst-moments, which just felt right to me in terms of thinking about how historical narratives try to smooth over the rough patches.
That didn’t feel true or right to me in this case. Their lives are more prickly, they’re more these kinds of shiny baubles, so I felt like it needed to be a bumpier ride where there are sharp highs and lows mixed in together.
Caitlin Stout
What do you think history gets wrong about these two characters?
Jac Jemc
History paints Sisi as an upbeat, romantic figure, but I think she’s a really problematic person. She becomes really cold because of the way she is supposed to act and her inability to act within those parameters.
And people discount Ludwig as this dreamy figure but he really was deeply troubled. Everybody I know thinks Ludwig was in love with Wagner. I think that is absolutely not the case. That’s the danger of reducing a person’s identity down. Because it was covered up that he was gay, they’re like, “the reason he was so obsessed with Wagner was that he was in love with Wagner.” No, the reason he was obsessed with Wagner is that he loved the art he was making. I don’t think it had anything to do with the man himself.
With both of them, I was hoping to explore the ways in which the dominant narrative erases these complications or nuances of their lives that are ultimately really interesting. I wanted to write an ending where Ludwig was allowed to escape the confines of the palace and live his life in the way that we wanted to, openly gay, potentially, and where his devotion to the arts and his pacifist tendencies weren’t punished, but instead celebrated.
Caitlin Stout
There’s been a resurgence of interest in Sisi, in particular. Netflix recently released a series, while Corsage, which premiered at Cannes, takes on the empress in her later years. How do you think revisiting the stories of well-known figures of the past helps us reckon with our present?
Jac Jemc
I’m not generally a person who loves to read up on royalty. But I started working on the project in 2015 when the possibility of Trump being president seemed like a joke at the time. As I kept working, I started thinking about Ludwig as a precedent for a person in power who ignores huge parts of his job in a key moment in history. I mean, the unification of Germany is happening while Ludwig is having a stage designer build a castle for him. It’s interesting to look at history and see the patterns that are in place and continue to regenerate.
Caitlin
What’s your next project?
Jac Jemc
The thing that I’m working on right now is another horror project about a haunted painting. One overlap between Empty Theatre and this project is that it does work backward in time pretty far. I think I did like the options afforded to me by being able to dip into other moments in history and seeing how the story can be changed because you’re in a different moment.
FICTION
by Jac Jemc
MCD
Published on February 21, 2023
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